Technologism

We are just running forward to try to leave behind our debt, not realizing that we’ve been at it for long and the debt only grew.

We refuse to acknowledge the failures of our current society, and hope to solve them quickly by making something new, running for a new unexplored corner of existence. Something not yet assessed, therefore not known to be bad.

We’ve been at it for ten millennia now.

We need to slow down, look at what we’ve left behind and learn from it. Our society has failings, we know it. However, what we refuse to do is any kind of sacrifice to fix those failings. Looking at a vague blurry distant image, that looks somewhat better is what we do. This frees us from the remorse of not attending to our most important tasks. A distraction from our soiled conscience.

Programmers know the concept of “technical debt”. A failing in the organization of code, something that needs to be fixed to stop being a stumbling block when adding new code, or stop harming users. Programmers also know that technical debt is often ignored by organizations. You need to sneak your fixes in, otherwise you get blamed for working on worthless things (disclaimer: this isn’t from personal experience).

If the harm done to users doesn’t threat revenues, and if the harm done to velocity can’t be measured, the technical debt, and – how surprise – the organization slowly fades into irrelevance.

Consumerism

Consumerism is buying stuff to forget you anxiety. Temporary relief to misery. A daunting task of evaluating, planning and developing a strategy to get things to improve, now left for later. Hopefully with enough delays, even after death. Now need to worry about anything now.

Technologism is to society was consumerism is to individual.

This is definitively a moral failure, not of individuals, but of organizations. We need to question ourselves, be aware of why we are doing what we do today. We can’t afford to pile on and on our debts, eventually we have to pay it out. We need to face head-on our problems and accept that they may need time and resources now to be solved.

This is a sacrifice of today for a better tomorrow.